Comment by pimeys
3 hours ago
The competition is real in pricing. Thanks for the Chinese open models, US big players have to cut their inference pricing. We've done a bunch of evals between the models, and Kimi K3 was the first one that actually could compete or be even better than Opus or Sol in our use cases, with a fraction of the price. All our developers use K3 as their programming model, and it now powers a big part of our systems instead of Opus and GPT. Surprisingly the new Sol pricing is quite similar to K3...
Now DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731 is eating Gemini's lunch, and suddenly we saw a price cut (the "introductory price") for 3.7. DeepSeek is of same quality or sometimes better than Gemini for text, Google knows it and they have to compete. Too bad it's too little and too late, it's still 4-5x more expensive in our evals.
And these models are not going away, nor their prices going up because of competition in the inference providers and due to the fact that you can buy/rent the hardware and run them in your own premises.
It's funny how quickly we went from "the greedy US companies are subsidizing prices to keep competitors out of the market" to "the greedy US companies are overcharging because they are greedy."
They are subsidizing the non-API use cases and overcharging on the API use cases.
That's why Claude access was blocked for OpenClaw. They were utilizing non-API use cases credits for what should be API use cases.
No, almost everyone has been in agreement that they’re subsidizing subscriptions, but there have literally been dozens (hundreds?) of threads on HN in the past 12 months with people vehemently arguing that API prices are subsidized.
I shifted from DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731 to Gemini 3.7 flash on openrouter and price shoots up almost double with no visible change in outcome. So, today I reverted back.
Try DS through their own API if that's feasible, AFAIK they're much cheaper than through OS due to cache hit rates.
They just raised their prices sadly.
Tell me why price adv not working this same on web pages. Why price od advertisment on portals, social media etc. not fall down?
> Opus or Sol in our use cases, with a fraction of the price.
I assume it's highly use case dependent, though?
Even before the price cut seems like Sol was price competitive with Kimi
https://artificialanalysis.ai/models?models=gpt-5-6-sol-xhig...
And now it should be considerably cheaper
Long-context agentic tasks and Rust engineering are our use cases where Kimi definitely is better than Sol. We can measure our own systems and the numbers say that Sol has no chance against K3 or Opus, and K3 is so so so much cheaper than Opus right now.
You cannot just look at the price tags for these models, you must eval and see the price per task. In our previous eval rounds Sol was more expensive than Opus (with its original price), took much longer, and provided worse results. Kimi does not have these issues, it's just as good as Opus with a smaller price tag.
China's 50 Cent Party being a real and noticeable thing (and the two biggest things they like to shill is open weight Chinese models and the futility of resisting a Taiwan invasion), I have to take things like this with a healthy dose of skepticism without corroborating data, since independent evals didn't show the price per task lead you're showing.
If there's independent data showing this feel free to share a link, I haven't seen it. DeepSWE has been most closely matching what I see in my own use.
1 reply →
I was struck by a video ad that Google released yesterday with testimonials by three developers about using Gemini 3.7 Flash [1]. The point they emphasize most is price, followed by latency. The marketing strategy definitely seems to be shifting.
[1] https://youtu.be/kacf2bib-X0
> And these models are not going away, nor their prices going up [...]
Well, DeepSeek just raised prices.
And Fireworks did not yet. They are still under the limit of not feasible to self host... Let's see if other providers follow DeepSeek with their flash pricing.